[Osmf-talk] Tagging standards

[Niels Elgaard Larsen]

Frederik Ramm:
> Hi,
> 
> On 20.10.22 10:59, Shawn K. Quinn wrote:
>> I don't see what's wrong with:
>>
>> amenity=cafe
>> takeaway=only
>>
>> in this case.
> 
> I do see what is wrong with that. We're going around telling everyone how great OSM 
> is, how liberating and how they can finally map their own area themselves without 
> being limited by whatever big business thinks a map should be -


It is not just about regional differences because we also have Italian bars, US 
restaurants, wine bars, etc in Denmark.

Even in Denmark, which a small region, it is not easy to choose between 
bar,cafe,restaurant,fast_food, etc.
   And I have been fooled by the tagging several times here in Denmark. For example 
on trips away from big cities, searching in OsmAnd for "Cafe and restaurant" for a 
place to have a nice dinner with my wife, and not finding anything great, and then 
later passing something that would have been perfect and checking why it was not in 
OSM and finding out that e.g., it was tagged as fast_food because it was a pizzeria 
but they had tables with candlelight, a wine card, starters and desserts. Or that it 
was a wine bar with nice dinner menu, tagged as a bar.

As a user I typically want to find food places where e.g,

* you can get a beer or a glass of wine with you meal.
* you can go out with your spouse, friends etc, sit down and have lunch or dinner.

I doubt that we could come up with values for the eatery amenities that is much 
better than we have now, and it would be a mess to change it now.

We should accept that the values (restaurant,cafe,bar,fast_food, etc) does not carry 
that much information and try to confer useful information in other ways.

For example opening_hours (or lunch,dinner) will help against standing at closed bars 
at 8am. Or going to a Danish lunch restaurant at dinner time.

smoking=yes tells me that I do want to go there (in Denmark smoking is illegal where 
food is served, but in some regions it is allowed)

the food tag can prevent disappointments.

cuisine can also be useful.

drink:wine=served and drink:wine=no can give an indication about what kind of place 
it is. In some countries only a few restaurants in international hotels serve wine.
In many countries you cannot know if you could get a drink in a cafe.

indoor_seating and outdoor_seating is also helpful. Although sometimes it is hard to 
tag. E.g., many fast food places have a table and a few chairs where you could sit 
and eat your food, but most would only sit there waiting for the food to be ready.

the 'stars' tag is useful only for a very small fraction of the restaurants. And 
relies on a single company. However I really like the Michelin concept of ranking it 
by worth a stop, worth a detour and worth a journey and I wish we could have more of 
that in OSM. Of course it quickly gets very subjective.

> and then we tell them "no, your bar is really a cafe", just so that someone who 
> doesn't know shit about Italy can still use their hipster coffee app (which doesn't 
> know shit about Italy) to find the nearest coffee place.
> 
> I'm a computer nerd myself and I know where the desire for standardisation comes 
> from. Make the world machine-readable and we can do so many cool things, yay!
> 
> But there is a form of colonialism in this "making the world machine-readable", 
> because who decides what the machine can read?
> In my eyes, the Italians should be free to record their bars as bars. And then an 
> Italian person can search for the nearest "bar", knowing that they will get a coffee 
> there (a "normal coffee" by the way, which in many other countries would be called an 
> "espresso"). Yes, this makes everything more complicated, and there will be the odd 
> Italian in Paris who stands before a closed bar at 8am wondering where to get his 
> coffee, but that's diversity for you. Hitting everything with the Global Unified 
> Tagging Hammer to abstract from cultural differences is, in my opinion, a misguided 
> attempt to streamline the world into an easy computer-readable landscape.

This is also about language.
We have settled mostly on English words as tags. That means that for non 
English-speaking regions we have to try to map local concepts to English names. That 
works OK, but is not always easy.

However some of those words also exists in other languages but means something 
different. Or words exists in other languages that are literal translation of OSM 
tags. And that makes it temping to just use the OSM tag that happens to be spelled 
the same way or matched by a literal translation.

For example in Danish a wind turbine is normally called a "vindmølle" which literally 
translates to "windmill" which does match the OSM tag man_made=windmill and it has 
led to some wind turbines being tagged as windmills in the past.

But that is just a language issue and not a cultural difference. Wind turbines are 
mass produced (many in Denmark) and it would be silly to tag the same wind turbine 
differently depending on where it was installed.

power=line does not work in Danish. A "line" is a piece of string or rope.
power=tower does not work. Tower in Danish is "tårn" and that is a building, instead 
we use "mast" which does match man_made=mast

> The "Italian bar" example is an obvious one but there will be many more and subtler 

Yes we have a lot of amenities that are not easy to fit into tags already in use in OSM.
But the reason that we are talking about "bar" and "cafe" is because we are 
discussing in English on this list and these are (also) English words.

Tagging Italian "bars" and "cafes" as amenity=bar/cafe just because they are spelled 
the same way or almost the same way in the two languages does not necessarily make 
more sense than tagging amenity=kneipe in Germany or amenity=værtshus in Denmark.

OSM tags is a kind of language. And we map local (also English) words to OSM. And a 
literal translation is not always the correct translation.

> differences. Every person in Iceland knows that they will be able to get hot soup at 
> a gas station, but do we therefore have to add an amenity=fast_food, cuisine=soup to 
> all of them just to that a foreigner doesn't have to learn that fact? Dumb down every 
> aspect of local culture everywhere, for the benefit of the unified global 
> culture-indifferent navigation app?


There are probably some unmanned gas stations without food.
And you can probably pay with credit cards and get octane 95 at gas stations too, but 
we still tag that.
In Hungary there are a lot of gas stations with food=yes.

-- 
Niels Elgaard Larsen